Minister of tertiary education, Steven Joyce, is preparing to name four new councillors, including the chairs and deputy-chairs, to each of New Zealand’s twenty institutes of technology and polytechnics. These ministerial appointees will assume an effective majority on each of the twenty councils, which will all be reduced to eight members each from 1 May.

The big losers in this exercise are staff, students, local hapu, local businesses and unions, who in most cases will lose the representation they have held on polytechnic councils for the past two decades or longer.

This continues the government’s attempt to assert greater control over the polytechnic sector in order to improve its productivity while also reduce its expenditure.

Mr Joyce told TV’s” The Nation programme last Sunday:

“We spend a huge amount in tertiary education in this country, well above the OECD average and more than Australia does, as a proportion of our total economy, so we are big spenders in tertiary education, and there are some issues in that… there’s definitely room to improve the outcomes for students and for the country, in terms of ensuring more people pass more courses and quality more, and my challenge is to do that without any more money.”

Mr Joyce argued that polytechnics as a subsector have had some challenges over the years, and signalled that he had a particular focus on regional polytechnics.

“They have lots of assets, they’re very expensive to maintain, they’ve struggled with performance, some of them, not all of them, and of course many of them are in regional areas of the country where they’re not getting a lot of students.”

Mr Joyce neither prescribed nor ruled out merging or cutting polytechnics when questioned on” The Nation whether there are too many polytechnics in New Zealand.